Has anyone ever come across any clear documentation for all of these effects? The fact that there are so many cool procedural maps available, but the tutorials for how to utilise them are not seems a waste.

I've spent a good few hours playing around with them before but managed to get no practical use out of them because, as you know, with all the variables you can change it would take weeks or months to learn anything through trial an error.

This is probably less of an issue for Max users who tend to have had some kind of professional training, but those who use Sketchup for visualisation are at the shallow end of the visualisation pool are largely self trained I imagine. (Along with using amazing resources such as Sketchucation, of course )

Nice promotion, but a shame it's not extended to outside the US also.

As well as the other suggestions, have you tried increasing the HSph subdivs (under the irradiance map rollout) to something like 80-150 to reduce the blotchiness?

Is the example you posted the emissive test?

I think emissive would be the way to go, I'm not 100% sure what went wrong when you tried it?

If it looked too orthogonal and you wanted more of a faded feel to it you could just gaussian blur it in photoshop. Or you could try cutting a channel around the perimeter of the underside of the platform and set a strip of emissive material at an angle inside the channel. I imagine this would give a better effect, although I'm just thinking out loud here

good luck either way... will be interesting to see what other solutions there are

EDIT: For emissive you would have to play around with the intensity value. And for rectangular lights you can control the softness of the shadows by changing the shadow radius value... try something like 40 to start with then go higher/lower

Cool, thank you for the pointer. That's a new one for me.

Nice one, I was surprised to see that the background was made up of quite a few images. It's amazing what you can do in photoshop, but I always wonder how to get closer to these atmospheric images just through using Vray (especially with clients who change their minds a lot - all that photoshop work can go down the drain). Still, it's a beautiful final image he's created.

Peter Guthrie manages to get very atmospheric renders without much post production... maybe time to start looking at 3DS max I wonder?

Ahh my bad, I meant to type "I have GI and BG switched off and am only using HDRI dome"... I think the bright skies are in some cases the realistic effect with these camera settings... must learn to tweak them better and maybe start experimenting with the Aperture F value.

Thanks again for the tip though, I'm sure if other people are checking in on this thread it could help them also

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion I will try this, but I wonder how it will effect the illumination... you would expect it to make everything brighter, but I'm not sure by how much.

I wonder if it's possible to add a Tiff as the BG colour with a white bottom half and a transparent top half... this might stretch all the way to the horizon and not have any effect on the lighting... although it might not be a uniform shade of white if it is environmentally mapped. Will have to test!

Any more suggestions welcome.

Hi guys,

This might be a stupid question but... is it possible to have a solid floor level that reaches the horizon?

I ask because I am trying to render an animation in Vray, but the bottom half of the HDRI I'm using is black. Because my camera is quite high up and angled towards the ground level, a lot of this black is very visible in the rendered images. I have attached a screen shot below.

I can't recolour the HDRI sub-horizon to white as this will be used to produce lighting. There might be another solution, but a physical floor to the horizon is the only one I can think of.

Because it is an animation, there are hundreds of images - so editing each one individually post production isn't really an option

Thanks for any advice!

Jack

Hey guys,

Thanks for the pointers, and for the link. I'm not on my computer at the moment, but for that scene I was using something like Sun no clouds 1103 I think it was called.

I have GI and BG switched off and am only using GI... I think some of the problem comes when I use artificial lights, as I don't have much experience in setting the power of them - so sometimes the camera settings I use are incorrect to compensate for darkness. Still got a lot to learn!